Search the site

Guardian Angel

GUARDIAN ANGEL, My Story, My Britain, charts the journey of a journalist and writer who moved from darling of the left to champion of the moral high ground. This memoir of her personal and professional life
reflects the cultural changes in society over more than three decades.

The book is among the opening titles released by Melanie's new
publishing company, Melanie Phillips Electric Media. It can be purchased
from emBooks.com as well as from amazon.com, amazon.co.uk and iBooks.

Paralysis and moral confusion on Piazza Mahatma Gandhi

It is hard not to see the crisis at St Paul’s Cathedral as
an all-too vivid symbol of a far wider and most profound malaise.

As has been noted, the debacle at St Paul’s over the tented
‘Occupy the Stock Exchange/Occupy London’ protest encampment in front of it
threatens to inflict a terrible blow on the authority of the Church of England
itself. With yesterday’s resignation of the Dean, the Rt Rev Graeme Knowles, on
the grounds that his position had become “untenable”, the tally so far of
cathedral casualties from this affair has now reached four – three members of
the Chapter having resigned, and Martin Fletcher, the clerk of the works,
having collapsed from stress after giving the initial advice for St Paul’s to
close and who has been off work as a result ever since.

This initial decision to close the cathedral on health and
safety grounds was reversed in the face of general derision. Now the
cathedral’s decision to start legal proceedings along with the City of London
to evict the protesters has today also been reversed.
This was because reportedly,
at a critical meeting last Friday, the Dean’s was the sole voice in favour of
legal action on grounds of trespass on private land.

So now the City of London is going it alone in legal action
to evict on the basis of blockage of a public highway; if they succeed, St
Paul’s will have been relieved of its problem, and if the eviction turns
unpleasant it can hold up its own hands to the world as clean. The words
‘whited’ and ‘sepulchre’ come to mind.

The cathedral’s zig-zags have caused it to be derided as a
national laughing stock. Now the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams,
is himself being blamed for not getting a grip on the situation at St Paul’s.
He finally broke his silence to side with the protesters in a typically opaque
way, as reported in this
story:

‘“The urgent larger issues raised by the protesters at St
Paul’s remain very much on the table and we need – as a Church and as society
as a whole – to work to make sure that they are properly addressed.”’

Really? And what issues might those be? The protesters are
purportedly against western capitalism and hold it responsible for all the ills
of the world. Does Dr Williams agree with this fatuous position?

Today the cathedral said it had appointed an investment
banker, Ken Costa

‘to lead a new initiative “reconnecting the financial with
the ethical” which will involve various Church and City figures, including the
recently resigned Rev Dr Giles Fraser, former Canon Chancellor.’

Eh? Just how can such a woolly remit for a talking shop of
doubtless equally woolly worthies be expected to persuade the tented ones, who
have watched clerics go down like ninepins because of the protesters’ refusal
to leave and who therefore might reasonably be assumed to believe that they
have the whip hand in bringing about the collapse of a cathedral if not
capitalism, to depart?

When the Dean resigned, he said the cathedral faced
‘insurmountable issues’. But they are surely only insurmountable because the
church doesn’t seem able to distinguish right from wrong.

After all, the whole situation is farcical since the
original target of the wrath of ‘Occupy’ was supposed to be the Stock Exchange.
The tented ones seem only to have camped out at St Paul’s because it happened
to be the nearest space to the aforesaid temple of Mammon. Yet the Stock
Exchange and capitalism remain serenely untroubled by these protesters, whose
only victims to date have been the cathedral and the Church of England.

Moreover, it would appear that the encampment is itself
descending from principle to a spot of hedonism. The Times (£) reports:

‘But as the Church struggled to contain the fall-out from
the Occupy protest, some genuine campaigners quit the camp in disgust over its
descent into what one described as a place for bawdy hedonism, drink and drugs.

‘Zakandrew Roberts, 18, joined Occupy London on its first
day, but left on Saturday after a series of incidents, including someone
urinating in his tent and a friend being threatened with a penknife. He claimed
that the encampment had deteriorated from a group of serious campaigners intent
on highlighting issues about economic equality, to “drunks and drug-takers . .
. here for a laugh”.

‘Mr Roberts, an unemployed charity worker, said: “Half the
people there don’t know why they are there or what they are protesting about. I
want political change, not to get high and drunk all the time.”’

Might this perhaps also come under the remit of
‘reconnecting the financial with the ethical’?

Yet far from being angry at the protesters for such
idiotically incoherent and opportunistic grandstanding, Dr Williams and
assorted cathedral clerics seem to think that the Church of England is indeed a
prime villain of capitalism down there in the pit of infamy along with the evil
bankers. So what’s with this whole Anglican guilt trip?

It seems to me that there are two principal reasons for the
church’s current fix. First, it is paralysed by its own cardinal doctrine that
poverty is noble. It therefore instinctively hates those who make money. Now a
proper concern and compassion for the poor is indeed noble. But to fetishise
poverty to the extent that the church cannot recognise cant, hypocrisy and
anti-social behaviour is deeply troubling. It substitutes sentimentality for
the distinction between right and wrong.

The clerics of the Chapter are also said to be deeply
concerned that, in backing legal moves to evict the protesters, the cathedral
will be condoning violence – the specific issue over which the Canon
Chancellor, Dr Giles Fraser, resigned.

Well it is very much to be hoped that there will be no
violence in such an eviction. But if people resist attempts by the police to
enforce the law, sometimes force has to be used if the law is indeed to be
enforced. It has to be asked, therefore, whether these concerned clerics
believe that no force should ever be used in enforcing the law. If people are
trespassing on their land or obstructing the public highway, do these clerics
really think that because they are protesting about poverty they should be
regarded as above the law?

And in any event, what do they mean by ‘violence’? If people
are manhandled off a site because they refuse to move, is that really violence?
The clerics appear to assume that any violence would only come from the police.
But what if the protesters themselves were violently to resist the police? How
do these clerics think the law should be enforced in those circumstances?
Indeed, they appear to be coming dangerously close to saying that it
should not be enforced at all. Perhaps St Paul’s Churchyard should be renamed
Piazza Mahatma Gandhi.

Such near-farcical indecision and absence of clear
leadership now threaten to make the Church of England itself look ridiculous.
But just look at the backdrop against which this tragi-comedy is being played
out.

Everywhere, a sense of apocalypse is in the air. The Arab
world is in revolutionary ferment and bad men there are likely to be succeeded
by even worse. Iran is poised to unleash nuclear Armageddon. Israel,
under repeated rocket attack from Gaza, is menaced by genocidal enemy armies on
all sides except for the Mediterranean Sea. America, for so long the bulwark of
western defences, is currently out of that game thanks to the Manchurian narcissist
in the White House (look at this
open distancing from the US by the west’s erstwhile ally, the King of
Jordan, to grasp just what damage Obama has done to the free world).

The west is teetering on the edge of financial catastrophe;
the EU is staggering about like a punch-drunk boxer on the brink of collapsing
with a brain haemorrhage; and Britain’s Prime Minister, panicking under the
pressure of events that cannot be scripted by his pollsters, is desperately
tossing out banal policy soundbites of cosmic irrelevance to these global
challenges like the brief sparks from a dud catherine wheel stuttering in the
face of a tornado.

If ever there was a time for the religious guardians of
western civilisation to stand as its rock-solid defenders through their
conspicuous moral clarity, this is surely it. But unlike the churches in the US
which are have served as the bulwark of western civilisation in the culture
wars that have been playing out there for decades, the Church of England has
long been on its knees appeasing the enemies of civilisation -- secularism,
leftism and now also Islamism.

In the Blitz, St Paul’s stood as a symbol of freedom.
Tragically, through its current paralysis, loss of nerve and moral confusion
this great cathedral has now become a symbol of the paralysis, loss of nerve
and moral confusion of the west as it teeters towards the edge of the
precipice.

About Melanie

Melanie Phillips is a British journalist and author. She is best known
for her controversial column about political and social issues which
currently appears in the Daily Mail. Awarded the Orwell Prize for
journalism in 1996, she is the author of All Must Have Prizes, an
acclaimed study of Britain's educational and moral crisis, which
provoked the fury of educationists and the delight and relief of
parents.